Edition No. 85 | May 21, 2024

Hey,

Normal Sport illustrator – and tbh the illustrator for most of the underground golf worlds you enjoy – Jason Page is always encouraging me to let people in on my process and show a bit of how the sausage gets made. I think he’s probably right inasmuch as it is humanizing to be a human so here you go.

I’m writing this as I fly to meet my family for a beach vacation. Throughout any given major week, I have thoughts rattling around in my head about the event itself, what I believe to be true about various players and a mishmash of nuggets I noticed or thought about at some point during the tournament.

I can almost physically feel them hanging over me until I write them all down. That is a good thing because it’s a sign that this newsletter has become part of my weekly routine. Something I know I must do and something I am constantly aware of.

If I’m dialed, I take good notes on all of this throughout the week. Usually I don’t. I use Twitter as a repository. I tweet things I want to remember and write about later or RT and like the rest of them.

This newsletter is where the more ridiculous stuff I’ve considered throughout the week gets documented. So in this instance, I’ll just grab the laptop during my flight and start jotting down numbers and thoughts. It’s not perfect by any means – and sometimes getting started can feel a little bit like work – but after looking around my mind for a bit, I can usually find the flow I’m looking for and ride it to the end of the newsletter.

That part is not work at all. It’s just become part of who I am.

Right now I’m sitting on a connecting flight at the DFW airport (allegedly the worst airport in the United States) trying to process what I think and feel about Xander and what has transpired over the last few weeks with Rory and whether I actually believe this major was swiped from Scottie and that his eventual three-major season should have a grand slam-sized asterisk.

We’ll get to all that, and this newsletter will be split into two parts. A few thoughts today and a few more on Thursday. I’ve already written them all and scheduled both emails because I’m going to put the phone and computer away for the rest of the week and enjoy some time with my kids and our friends.

I’ll be back with another newsletter at the beginning of next week.

Thank you as always for reading.

Onto the news.

But first, thanks to Holderness and Bourne for sponsoring this week’s newsletter. I’m not saying you should do this, but I saw plenty of people who paid tribute to the No. 1 player in the world with orange-colored attire on the weekend at Valhalla.

Again, don’t do this … but if you insist on doing it, at least make it something quality like H&B’s Betts pullover.

1. I usually have at least one take that is inflammatory enough in a given major week that it truly bothers me and I wish I could have it back. A good week is zero. A normal week is one. A bad week is more than that. This week’s was actually one about Bryson I didn’t even mean the way it was taken.

I snapped a photo of the Greatest Showman¹ banging balls on the range in the dark on Friday evening and innocuously tweeted “of course” with the pic of our high king of content. I didn’t think much of it, but I got popped a little into the weekend by a variety of very aggressive LIV and Bryson stans.

In retrospect, my “of course” definitely could have been interpreted as sarcastic, like “look at this dude, can you believe he’s practicing again?”

Couple of thoughts on that.

1. I would never [checks notes] make fun of a professional golfer for working hard.

2. I think Bryson works incredibly hard.

3. I also think Bryson enjoys letting you know that Bryson works hard.

4. I think an easy way to do that is by hitting balls after dark at a major.

5. Part of Bryson’s whole ethos feels a little adjacent to Russell Wilson stretching for games on the team plane.

6. Context matters. Scottie hitting balls after dark feels different because Scottie carries himself very differently the rest of the time than Bryson does.

7. Something like this can be both hard work and a little “look how hard I’m working while you’re watching Live From!”

8. My “of course” was more like “if I had to give you one guess who’s on the range after dark at a major championship, of course you would guess Bryson.”

9. That you could have guessed this is at least a little eye roll-y!

10. I, like everyone (!), think Bryson is completely and totally absurd.

11. The entire thing was a nod to his absurdity but not a critique of his work.

12. I can’t believe I’m addressing this.

I’d like to add that, for everyone who crushed me for “hating Bryson for the last five years” I mean, I don’t know. Is that what I was doing? I’d love to see all those tweets and columns of me spewing hate toward Bryson.

The dude tried to win the Masters (and the PGA!) with 3D printed irons. I don’t know that pointing out his ridiculousness is “hating Bryson.” I definitely enjoy his theatrics and his presence because it always gives me something to write about. I also think he’s become more likable as a player and a person.

That leads us to No. 2, which is just a little Twitter post I write up on Sunday morning. It hit me on a morning run on Sunday before the final round.

2. Here it is.

3. The theme of my Sunday column for CBS Sports is that people change, which means narratives do, too. Like many others, I found myself rooting for Bryson on Sunday for reasons I’m not totally sure of right now.

He seems to have embraced himself as a player and a showman, which makes it easier for everyone else to do the same. Maybe that is what we’re all feeling. I’m not totally sure.

But it applies to Xander, too. The fair narrative that he couldn’t close and that he consistently ran away from leads is dead forever.

Narratives change because people do, too.

Remember the narratives around Phil in 2002 and 2003? How stupid and insane do they seem now that he’s a six-time (six-time!) major champion. But we couldn’t have known that was going to happen in the moment.

Sometimes I think the sarcastic “this take aged well” trope is so tired. Yeah, it’s easy to say something didn’t age well with like five years’ worth of information when you can look backwards!

That’s not really the point I’m trying to make, though.

The point is that if we don’t change our minds about stuff when presented with new information then that is the actual problem. Like, if I went to the U.S. Open saying “You know, Xander just can’t win the big one,” I would be a fool. And yet sometimes I think people act as if what you said at a very specific point in time must be your take forever or you are intellectually dishonest when, in reality, the opposite of that sentence is true.

4. We talked about Xander a lot at lunches, dinners and hang out time all week. The stories around him from other players were always like, Dude, you guys do not understand the ceiling here. And that never really added up to me. He was like a rich man’s Tommy Fleetwood, which is an extremely good player but not an inconceivable ceiling like I was being told.

And while the “can’t win the big one” narrative is done forever, it also doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it or root for it. One thing I think about a lot in my job is why we root for certain guys but not others. I have sometimes obsessed over this and should probably at some point write a longer book-like piece about it.

There are probably too many reasons to get into in this particular newsletter, but certainly one of them is that the vulnerability it requires to emote is the same vulnerability that endears us to you as a player.

Here’s a thought exercise: Try to think of a single Xander Schauffele fist pump. Just one. At any point, after all the tournaments he’s been involved in and big events he’s played, conjure up one single image of him emoting with anything beyond that little half wave he gives following a birdie.

I’ve never heard a bad word about Xander behind the scenes as a person – perhaps a few misguided notes as it relates to the Ryder Cup brouhaha – but his golf reminds me of something a buddy randomly texted me one time that I thought was like the funniest thing ever.

Just completely out of nowhere several years ago, one of my good friends said, “Who is a Dwight Howard fan? Where are they?! Do they exist? Who likes Dwight Howard?” I feel a bit of the same about Xander.

Just, he’s an excellent player, has tons of gifts, has a nice story of learning what it means to be great and then going and doing it. But never has he made me feel anything. Not at a Ryder Cup. Not at a Masters.

Not anywhere at any point.

That’s fine, I suppose, Xander doesn’t need to make me or anyone feel anything at all. I think it says less about him as a person and more about what it means to fall in love with watching and following someone.

The narrative coming out of the last year or so is that Scottie Scheffler is boring – which is fair! – but I have to say Xander makes Scottie look like a Rihanna concert by comparison.

5. Speaking of Scottie. I wrote extensively about his arrest on Friday night, but I do think getting arrested, jailed and still finishing top 10 is at least as impressive as winning the Masters by four. Maybe more so.

Word on the ground was that he was shook following Friday’s round and going into Saturday when he shot his first round over par in 266 days.

Who wouldn’t be?

The come down from that adrenaline high of Friday’s 66 with the whole sports (and much of the pop culture) world watching had to be a ride. The “my friend who doesn’t follow golf but was texting me about Scottie” ratios were off the charts last week.

I don’t think it’s an asterisk on Xander’s win, but if Scottie wins Pinehurst — which he will (possibly by five) — it’s going to be frustrating that we could have been on slam watch deep into the summer.

One thing I don’t think I wrote on Friday but I definitely believe is that Friday was perfectly emblematic of why I started this newsletter.

Think about all the variables that go into a golf tournament. Insane logistics, impossible food service, months of infrastructure buildout, dozens and dozens of trucks and trailers on site, tributaries of fans, media, volunteers, service workers, players, caddies, families and members all going different directions at all times.

And all of this in a new place for three of the four majors every single year. Oh, and the weather can absolutely wipe everything out or create any number of other problems at any moment. And we haven’t even gotten to the actual golf or golf course setup or any of it.

When you sit down and think about the number of variables compared to, say, a playoff basketball game, it’s kind of overwhelming. The crazy part is not that insane things happen every major both on and off the course with that many variables involved.

No, the crazy part is that they would ever go off without a hitch at all.

6. Rory. We need to talk about it. Not the golf, though that was disappointing. The entire tournament was his for the taking on Friday afternoon and he laid a total egg. A 71 that was equaled or bettered by five club pros in the second round. That’s a huge bummer for somebody who’s in a 10-year war.

But no, we need to talk about everything else.

I thought Joel Beall wrote nicely about it in the middle of the week.

Here’s his opener.

If I can be honest here, I was struggling to identify what I was feeling on Monday and Tuesday after the news broke. I was in my head about it, thinking about it constantly, wondering what was going on. Then it hit me on Wednesday that what I was experiencing was legitimate and authentic sadness.

There is sadness for Rory and his family, but more so sadness for the brokenness of the world. That things are not as they should be. That you often feel like your life should unfold one way only to find out at some point that it has not.

Rory is – this should not be surprising – a romantic. He sees the world as he wishes it would be, thinks it could be and believes it should be.

So I know on some level, somewhere deep inside – because Rory has the same thing written on his heart that the rest of us have written on ours – there is a depth of despair that is inconsolable by any human decision or direction he has in front of him.

It is perhaps strange to feel sadness for someone who is not quite a friend but not quite not a friend either. But that is what I feel. I feel this because I know Rory experiences things deeply and believe that this is affecting him more than he let on throughout PGA Championship week.

How could it not?

We have all felt the brokenness of the world. Whether it’s a difficult, wayward child, a cracked and flailing marriage, a circle of friendship barely hanging on or the sorrow that loss brings about, we have all understood that the world is uncontrollable and irreparable.

Tim Keller, a theologian who died during last year’s PGA Championship and who was remembered during this year’s, has one of my all-time favorite quotes about loss and suffering.

Loss, which is what divorce is, remains a part of our world, and loss makes me sad. Loss should make me sad. It should make all of us sad. That was what I walked away from Valhalla last week thinking about and attempting to process.

Perhaps that makes me a fool and a rube.

But perhaps I wouldn’t want to live life any other way.

7. The phrase “$80 pants damaged beyond repair” will never leave my brain.

How Is This App Free?

There were so many incredible tweets from last week. Here are some of my favorites.

Thanks for reading until the end.

You are a sicko.